Fall and Halloween freebies and Five for Friday!

24 October 2015

Hello Friends,

It is a Saturday morning in the Fall and I am once again writing my Five for FRIDAY post on a Saturday. I think it is time for me to stop writing that sentence because it seems to be the NORM for me these days and I just need to face the fact that when school is out on Friday, I am a slug and cannot bring myself to do anything school related!

I thought I would share with you a few things that we did this week and a couple of things that I plan to do THIS week...

1. In our kindergarten, we still believe that patterns need to be reinforced. We have taken out the old "AB, AABB, ABC" language, but continue to teach the repeated pattern concept. It is true that patterning is taught in most pre-K classrooms, but I believe that it must still be reviewed and reinforced in kindergarten. We do many patterning activities, but this one is my favorite. After exploring patterns, we send this home and ask parents and child to create a pattern upon this pumpkin. They can use anything that they have at home. The variety is always fun and because it is such a simple project, we usually get 100% participation.

2. We did this cute Fall tree math activity. First we read Lois Ehlert's RED LEAF, YELLOW LEAF book. Then we did the math activity. I told my co-teacher that they kind of looked like hot air balloons, but oh well... it's the learning that counts right?

3. We also did some pumpkin investigating. Here we are measuring the height of our pumpkins using unifix cubes. This is from Deanna Jump's Pumpkin Patchunit.

3. We also made a mini book of the pumpkin life cycle. You can click the image below to take you to Five Fabulous Pumpkin Literacy centers resource.

4. We are going to make these witches next week. I know that many of you cannot do Halloween things, but we still can in our school. The kids will follow the step by step directions for how to create the witch and then write some sentences about it. This will be a project that will done during our Writer's Workshop time. This witch is free in my TPT store. Click the image to take you there.

5. We will also be creating a few more Halloween characters as well as reading a Halloween emergent reader. These are taken from my Halloween I Can Draw, I Can Write packet.

And that's it for now, my friends! Make sure you visit Doodle Bugs Five for Friday! Poor Kacey has the stomach flu, though, so she did not write her fantastic weekly post... Take care, sweet Kacey....